The block management system behind your portfolio

A few thousand leasehold flats, four quarter days a year, and a portal the leaseholders see before they see anyone in the office.

A typical business running one of these has 10 to 40 staff and somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand units across purpose-built blocks, converted houses and mixed estates, with property managers who each look after a patch of blocks, an accounts team running the client money, a maintenance desk taking the repairs, and several hundred compliance certificates arriving a year. Plenty of agents run a bought package; this is the system written for one agent's own portfolio. Built in 2005 or in 2019, it takes the same blocks through the same quarter days.

In the property manager's words, it holds every block, unit, lease and leaseholder. It runs the service charge: the budget per block, each lease's schedule and percentage, the on-account demands, the reserve fund contributions, the year-end reconciliation and the balancing charges. It demands ground rent where the leases still carry it, chases arrears, keeps client money per block and reports to the freeholder or the residents' management company. It logs repairs, raises works orders and matches the contractors' invoices, and holds the compliance dates it was given fields for.

The rules it holds are the ones a new property manager takes a year to learn:

• Each block has apportionment schedules of its own: every unit pays into the estate schedule, only some pay into the lift schedule, and one block has a schedule with a single unit in it.
• A works order that would cost any one leaseholder more than £250 is held for Section 20 consultation before it is raised.
• Ground rent on one estate doubles on a fixed date under the lease, and the demand run knows the date.
• Interest on late service charge is charged at the rate in the lease from the due date, but only after the second reminder has gone.
• No service charge demand goes out without the statutory summary of leaseholders' rights and obligations, which the run attaches every time.

The leases say some of that. The system is where the rest lives.

The office side was written around 2005, usually by a contractor who knew the property trade, as a Microsoft Access front end over a SQL Server database. Around 2008 a Classic ASP portal went on beside it, so leaseholders and the directors of residents' management companies could log in for a statement and report a repair. Demands and letters come out of Word merge templates. The database, the portal and IIS all run on the server in the office, and the Access screens are copied onto each desk.

The contractor answers slowly now, or has stopped answering. The portal's source may exist only on the web server itself, and VBScript, the language underneath it, is being retired from Windows. So the demand run is left alone, the portal is left alone, and every new requirement goes into a spreadsheet.

The same system built between 2016 and 2022, by a small agency or a freelancer, as a web system in PHP, .NET Core or React, Angular or Node, or put together in Zoho Creator by an accounts manager who had seen what it could do. The office screens and the portal are one system in a browser, the demands go out as PDFs by email, and the leaseholders can pay online. To the property managers it felt like the Access years were over.

The payments were usually the first thing to go. The payment provider retired the interface the portal used, the card button stopped working, and leaseholders went back to bank transfers with references nobody can match. Then a tweak to one block's apportionment put the wrong figure on a quarter's demands, and after the credit notes the demand run was declared off limits. Its developer left the agency that built it, and nobody there picked the system up. Since 2023 a few agents have had a leaseholder portal most of the way built with an AI app builder, and those builds tend to stop at the point they must write to the ledger. The quarter days keep arriving, on a system as stranded as the Access one it was meant to retire.

Demands out on the day across the whole portfolio, and client money that reconciles.

An office of a dozen cannot apportion a few thousand units by hand four times a year. The system does it, block by block, schedule by schedule, and the demands go out on the quarter day in the form the lease and the law require. Arrears follow from the same ledger, so the reminders go to the right people with the right figures on them.

The accounts side is what the auditor looks at. Client money is separated per block and reconciled, the report to the residents' management company and the leaseholder's statement come from the same ledger so they agree, and each block's year-end accounts start from the system. The compliance dates it holds surface before they lapse. And the portal takes the repair reports and shows the statements, so the phones ring less.

It still runs every quarter day. That is the point, and the problem.

The portal runs on a language being retired. Classic ASP pages are written in VBScript, which Microsoft is retiring from Windows in phases: an optional feature now, planned to be off by default around 2027, and removed after that. The portal sits on IIS on a Windows Server 2016 that ends in January 2027, and it cannot take a photo with a repair report or a card payment, so leaseholders email instead.

The demand run is the thing nobody touches. The apportionment schedules live in the demand run's code, so a new schedule is a developer change and there is no way to preview a run before the demands go out. The month before a quarter day, nothing in the system is changed at all.

The compliance list outgrew the date fields. Whether the system was given its fixed set of certificate fields in 2005 or in 2019, the list has grown past them. Fire risk assessments, electrical installation reports, lift inspections, asbestos surveys and the building safety duties that came with the Building Safety Act 2022 live in a spreadsheet per block and on a wall planner.

Year end happens outside it. Each block's service charge year end means exporting the ledger to Excel for the accountant, reconciling by hand, and typing the balancing charges back in. The client money reconciliation to the bank is done the same way, and the auditor asks about it every year.

The same portfolio and the same schedules, on a supported server, with the leaseholders, the contractors and the bank connected to it.

A portal that takes a photo and a payment. Statements, documents, a repair report with photos, a card payment, the directors' view for the residents' management company, all on the same database the office uses. The leaseholder emails stop, and the Classic ASP question goes away with the old pages.

A demand run you can change and preview. The apportionment schedules in tables per block, the ground rent date and the interest rule beside them, and a dry run against a copy that shows every unit's figure against last quarter's before a single demand is sent.

A compliance register that takes any certificate. Any type, its cycle, the contractor, the document itself, with a portfolio view of what lapses next month. The spreadsheet per block and the wall planner retire.

Repairs on the contractor's phone. The works order sent to the contractor, photos back on completion, the invoice matched to the order, and the Section 20 threshold flagged before the order is raised.

Year end and client money from the system. The bank feed reconciled against each client account daily, the year-end pack for the accountant produced from the ledger, and the balancing charges raised rather than typed.

Off the 2016 server. The database and the server under it both on versions that are still supported, with a backup that has been restored on purpose, and the public face of the business no longer depending on the 2016 box.

The Access screens are not switched off for any of this. Each piece is added beside them, and the demand run is the last to move.

The certificates and bank lines that arrive in other people's formats, and the questions nobody built a report for.

None of it touches the lease or the apportionment. AI reads what comes in and drafts what goes onto the system, and a person confirms it.

Certificates read into the compliance register. Contractors send fire risk assessments, electrical installation reports, lift examinations and water risk assessments as PDFs, each in its own layout. AI reads the block, the type, the inspection date, the next due date and any remedial actions, and files them for a property manager to check. At several hundred certificates a year, a few land every working day, and the keying they took typically gives the property managers back the better part of an hour between them each day.

Payments matched after the quarter day. Leaseholders pay by bank transfer with references that name the flat, the street, or nothing at all. AI reads each bank line against the demands that went out and proposes the unit. With a few thousand units paying around each quarter day, the matching that kept accounts busy for several days afterwards typically shrinks to a day on the lines it could not place.

Questions no report covers. Which blocks have a fire risk assessment action still open past its date? Which leaseholders have had the second reminder but no interest charged yet? AI answers in plain words from the system's own records and lists the units, orders and certificates behind each answer, so the property manager checks before acting. A question that meant a query and a spreadsheet takes minutes.

Not worth doing: AI answering leaseholders' questions about their service charge. Those answers come from the lease, get argued at the tribunal, and a person sends them.

The demand run needs a copy to be tried against before anything is wired into its data, so all of this follows the first stage. The assessment marks where on this block management system AI would pay back soonest.

The demand run is not touched until there is a copy to try it on, so the stages that change nothing about it go first.

1. Stabilise. Source for the Access front end and the ASP portal found, the database and the server under it on versions that are still supported, a backup restored, and a test copy. This goes first because the server date is January 2027, and because the demand run cannot be changed safely until there is a copy that is not the live one.
2. The portal. A new one on the same data, taking photos and card payments. The first piece the leaseholders and the management company's directors feel, and it changes nothing on an office screen.
3. The compliance register and repairs on the contractor's phone. Each a stage, each priced on its own.
4. The demand run and year end. Apportionment in data with a preview, tested against last quarter's demands unit by unit, timed between quarter days with the old run still available; then year end and client money.
5. Retire the Access front end when nothing still depends on it. The last thing to go is usually the letter templates.

The assessment is from £395 + VAT, sized on a free one-hour consultation, with an exact price before you commit. For a block management system that means a few days with the property managers, the accounts team and the code, and a report with costed options and a fixed price for each. Each stage after that is priced before you commit to it. How we work, what drives the price and the payment terms each have a page, and so does each technology the system is built on: Microsoft Access, Classic ASP and SQL Server, and for the newer generation old PHP, .NET Core and React, Angular and Node. Where the contractor's silence is the first problem, legacy software support covers that.